Before The Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Translated from Japanese by Geoffrey Trousselot and published by Hanover Square Press in 2019, but I don’t really know why any of them bothered as this book feels – at best – amateurish and – at worst – downright shit.

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As I’ve written about here before, my lover often often buys me time travel fiction as gifts.

Sometimes these are transcendental texts exploring and emphasising the fallibility and bleak sadness of fate, sometimes they are swashbuckling adventures that are a frothy joy and pleasure. But sometimes they’re just fucking shit.

This one – a strangely popular book that I’ve seen around quite a bit – is, alas, one of the shit ones.

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There seems to be a very genuine correlation between time travel books being shit and them being either exclusively marketed to massive genre nerds OR exclusively marketed to “book fans”, y’know, people who “love reading”, the kind of politically disengaged fools/status quo loving old guard who were objecting like whingy babies about the recent Fossil Free Books and Just Stop Oil protests in the UK.

(If you don’t know what either organisation is, Google them, but my opinion is that what both of those groups are doing is the absolute bare minimum anyone with any integrity should be doing and that those of us who aren’t joining in are – at best – cowards and – at worst – knowingly and cheeringly complicit in ecological and sociological crimes against humanity. (I consider myself a coward rather than a villain, but the fact that this opinion in itself would be considered “wild”, “outre” and “radical” fundamentally shows the mess we’re in as a society. I’m about to have a baby! I shouldn’t be acquiescing to this Deliverance meets The Road YA dystopia that we’re marching towards. But I do, because I’m a coward.))

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I like tasteful fonts and pastel colours, sure, of course I do. Like all of you, I am but human.

I like sentiment, sure, of course I do, I am but human and not a snob.

I like time travel narratives but I only really like them when they form an essential part of a plot.

This novel, a time travel novel (kind of) is an almost plotless “vibes based” text where nothing really happens, no one really matters that much and where any major events (life, birth, death, dying, etc, all that crap) is treated as if possessed of an inherent weight.

The novel is written as if mentioning e.g. a death in childbirth is narrative in itself.

As if mentioning e.g. someone being sad because their boyfriend of three years tells them that they’ve accepted a job offer in a different country is characterisation… It’s not. That’s a partial plot. Here it is treated as if that in itself is an entire work…

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Before The Coffee Gets Cold is about a boring coffee shop that has one seat in it that if you sit in it and drink a special coffee and think about a specific time you can be transported to that same coffee shop at that specific time but you can’t move from the seat and you are only there for as long as the special coffee stays warm (under ten minutes) and if you don’t drink the coffee (which tastes shit) something terrible happens but it’s never confirmed exactly what that is, and you can only ever do the time travel one time in your life and it never changes the present (though it is stated that actions in the past might change the way in which the present is arrived at, but this in no way ever becomes part of the “novel”, which could have been interesting…).

Characters in the book often ask what is the point of this time travel, given how it limits one to a particular location DOWN TO THE CHAIR, only lasts a few minutes and doesn’t change anything…

These characters are right to do so, as the author never offers a compelling justification for it. Either in the narrative or as a work of fiction.

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The book is in four sections that are all linked, but function almost as separate stories. Most of them are shit stories though.

In one section, a person tries to revisit their final date with a boring partner neither of whom was really into the other (it’s rare to see an absence of “chemistry” so bluntly in literature, where at least most of the time people who are written as lovers without a meaningful connection at least tend to be fucking)…

in another section a woman who works at the café who is pregnant but has heart problems and is likely to die in childbirth goes 15 years into the future to visit her half-orphaned child…

in another section someone with a boring, awful, family visits her boring sister before she died in a car crash that the time traveller needlessly blamed herself for, and the tone of the novel implies that the non-dead sister was somehow in the wrong because her boring sister was driving to visit her…

and one section – the only one i didn’t totally hate – was about a woman travelling back in time to chat for two minutes with her secretly mostly illiterate husband (he has written one letter) who in the present is suffering from dementia and no longer recognises her. This one did seem to work, but maybe I was just being less critical and more sentimental when I read that one, as – in hindsight – it probably wasn’t actually any better than the others…

I suppose the blunt melancholy of understated lives and slow death suited better the ambling, meandering characterlessness of the text. Or maybe it didn’t and the writer’s attempt at evoking feeling by statement worked more efficiently there than elsewhere…

Ultimately, tho, a pointless book. Not exciting, not effectively emotive, not beautiful, not knowing, not interesting, not unique.

I wouldn’t recommend…